Suggest a topic for me to write about

I have been keeping a folder on my computer where I drop emails that I send myself with ideas for future blog posts. However, I was browsing for some information yesterday and stumbled across Michael Kaplan's blog. I really liked how he had a set of articles called "administrivia" where he outlined his editorial, comment and contact policies and also provided a way for readers to suggest interesting topics for the future. So I decided to add a similar section to my blog. I am starting out by creating a post where you can suggest topics and also where I'll keep the list of topics I've got in my queue for the future. I'll try this out for a while and see how it goes - it has to be better than my current method of scanning a folder and re-reading emails I've sent to myself...

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2005
  Hi Aaron.
  
  I'm a new reader to these various Blogs, so first let me say THANKS for sharing such useful information.
  
  This is perhaps a topic that is too far outside of what you guys are doing here... I have started designing our next gen setup (product is a server based app; we bootstrap and then chain about 25 msiexecs, similar to what is described in a post here). We currently use a MSI package as the "top level" installer, and try to live within its limits for GUI support, event handling, etc.. This has become more difficult as our setup now supports installing on MS Cluster. (Say... that would also make a good topic.)
  
  At any rate, I have about a year to implement this, and I'm looking at perhaps using VS2005, .NET 2, to create a Windows Forms app as the new bootstrap (top level) installer. Any user input from folks doing something similar would be great.
  
  Thanks,
  Marv Fenner, HP (layoff survivor... for now)
  

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2005
  I would recommend the approach you described. I wrote a similar setup for a client that chained together about 15 setups (some of which were MSI based, and some were not). It turned out well. It wasn't perfect, but given the circumstances, it worked very well.
  
  Figuring out how to uninstall all of these was a problem. I'm not sure if that is a requirement for you, but I'd recommend figuring that out early enough to account for. And maybe plan for it even if the powers that be say it isn't be needed. ;)
  
  If you really want to get fancy in your app (I didn't because some of the setups I had to run were non-MSI based), you could use the external UI API's to get progress bar messages in your front end app. See MsiSetExternalUI.
  
  

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2006
  Hi Marco - I asked Jon Fincher (http://xpeqfe.blogspot.com/) about this scenario since he does the publishing of these hotfixes here at Microsoft.  Here is what he told me:
  
  You are referring to the Windows XP Professional updates, which the embedded team just re-releases on the OEM site.  There is not an RTF file generated for them.  The RTF files are generated only for updates that are unique to Windows XP Embedded.
  
  Thank you for your feedback on DUAScriptGen, I'm glad you are finding it useful.
  

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2007
  Please Aaron, make some comments about how to Fix Error Code 21 in Windows media Center(File Validation Error, Mismateched Guide Package....) The Guide can't be downloaded. It looks that there is not a place in Internet where the mistery has been solved Thanks

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2007
  Hi Spock2007 - All of the information I know of regarding this error code and other guide download error codes is located in the "Guide Download Errors" section of the blog article at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/articles/487537.aspx.  If you cannot find any solutions in those posts, I'd suggest posting a question at one of the following locations: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/newsgroups/reader.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/83/ShowForum.aspx